How to deal with duplicates on an e-commerce website
-
Hi guys,
So we have an e-commerce website and we have some products that are exactly the same but come in different colours. Lets say for example we have a Samsonite Chronolite and this bag comes in 55cm, 65cm and 75cm variations. The same bag also may come in 4 different colours. The bags are the same and therefore have the same information besides maybe the title tag varying due to the size and colour. But the descriptions are the same.
How do I avoid Google thinking I am duplicating pages or have duplicated pages. Google things we have duplicated when the scenario is as I have explained.
Any suggestions?
Best regards,
-
Thanks dude. But there's a of these pages, the damage control is just too much. But if I set products as configurable can Google read the products that are not visible individually or it just reads the configurable. We use Magento so it creates simple product variations which are then used to create the configurable. Like if you visit samsonite.com they have different products of different variations but it is one product that is configurable.
-
Couldn't have said it better myself. This is exactly the correct answer.
-
Hi there
If you're going to persist with separate landing pages for all size/colour varations, then you should make use of both the rel=canonical, rel=rev and rel=next meta tags in the of your HTML.
Choose one URL to serve as the "master page" - the one that you would like to rank if you intended to.
Starting with that page, add a canonical tag that points to that URL and then a rel=next tag for your first product variation. For example:
For the first variation page (product-variation-1), you want to add these tags:
For the second (product-variation-2):
And so on in a sequence until they are all covered.
The reason why I recommend using a canonical tag and the prev/next tags is to be absolutely sure the commands are adhered to. It is better practice, in this example, to use prev/next tags - however that is just for Google. Bing has a hard time adhering to that command and will sometimes flat out ignore it, which could lead to duplication issues on that search engine.
For further reading there's a very helpful Google Webmasters post on the topic right here.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Solving pagination issues for e-commerce
I would like to ask about a technical SEO issue that may cause duplicate content/crawling issues. For pagination, how the rel=canonical, rel="prev" rel="next" and noindex tag should be implemented. Should all three be within the same page source? Say for example, for one particular category we may have 10 pages of products (product catalogues). So we should noindex page 2 onwards, rel canonical it back to the first page and also rel="prev" and rel="next" each page so Google can understand they contain multiple pages. If we index these multiple pages it will cause duplicate content issues. But I'm not sure whether all 3 tags need adding. It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
E-Commerce Multilanguage - Better on Subdomains?
Hi, We have an e-commerce store in English and Spanish - same products. URLs differ like this: ENGLISH:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
www.mydomain.com/en/manufacturer-sku-productnameinenglish.html SPANISH:
www.mydomain.com/es/manufacturer-sku-productnameinspanish.html All content on pages is translated, e.g, H1, Titles, keywords, descriptions and site content itself is in the language displayed. Is there a risk of similar or near dupe content here in the eyes of the big G? Would it be worth implementing different languages on subdomains or completely different domains? thank you B0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Duplicate content
I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April. However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues. If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it. I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index? But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so. For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash® to use it you need to have Flash® installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site! Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Website change of address
Hi Everyone, I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP. We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct and via webmaster tools with google. My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address? With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions? It took 6 years of in house seo to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything. Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AgentMonkey0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
On our real estate site we have our office listings displayed. The listings are generated from a scraping script that I wrote. As such, all of our listings have the exact same description snippet as every other agent in our office. The rest of the page consists of site-wide sidebars and a contact form. The title of the page is the address of the house and so is the H1 tag. Manually changing the descriptions is not an option. Do you think it would help to have some randomly generated stuff on the page such as "similar listings"? Any other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0